Like every other person who believes in liberty, I am outraged by the continuing war that the Bush administration is waging against our civil liberties in the so-called “war on terror.”
The latest outrage was the recent decision by the infamous Bush Department of Justice (DOJ) to demand that Yahoo turn over its clients’ email messages that are stored in “the cloud,” that is, retained on Yahoo’s storage devices. Yahoo even now is battling the DOJ in federal court, arguing that all emails should need search warrants, because all emails (like all phone calls) carry the expectation of privacy, and that this should apply to all emails, no matter how old, and whether stored on home or host computers.
Yahoo has been joined by Google, whose attorneys filed a friend-of-the-court (amicus curiae) brief arguing that exact point. The fascistic Bushite DOJ has taken a different view. It admits that federal law requires a court order to examine messages in electronic storage that are less than 181 days old. But the DOJ is arguing that previously opened email is not really in “electronic storage”!
Coming on the heels of the DOJ’s push in March to be allowed access to the logs of the locations of people’s cellphones without court order, we can see a clear pattern of an out-of-control Bush administration eager to expand the power of government to snoop on innocent citizens.
But wait . . . I’m mistaken . . . it’s the “civil libertarian” Obama administration that is doing these things.
Oops. My bad.
